The Future is Nostalgic

2017 | Exhibition | Photography, video, sound sculpture, neon | Kalfayan Galleries, Athens, Greece

Human desire has always fashioned a time and place for itself to inhabit and breathe through. In 20th century urban space, it found its character within red neon lights, shady cinemas, and dusty newsstands filled with cheap tabloids. Men spoke of their heroic escapades searching for the ultimate erotic destination, a physical place that one can strive towards and ‘discover’ like a great explorer. They sailed into the night, the designated time of day when this lewd activity takes place, setting the scene for darkness to reign supreme. This epoch of sexual liberation created its own sense of image, sound and narrative, rooted in the culture of a modern body emancipated from tradition and societal restrictions. This exhibition features several bodies of work that drift around this subject in contrasted ways, yet exude a common seductive visual language. The works attempt to remind us that there was once a time when desire was associated with hope; a time that was not preoccupied with hard binary moralities, but marked its own softer version of the truth.


Exhibition views - The Future is Nostalgic - photos by Vartan Avakian